by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
The Environmental Protection Agency silenced scientific advisers who expressed concerns over the agency’s proposed carbon dioxide emissions limits for coal-fired power plants, House Republicans claim.
Republicans on the House’s science committee wrote a letter to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy (see attached) expressing concern that the agency ignored scientists charged with reviewing carbon emissions limits for new power plants. Scientists said that the agency rushed through the regulatory process and that the underlying science of the rule lacked adequate peer review.
“We are concerned about the agency’s apparent disregard for the concerns of its science advisors,” the Republican lawmakers wrote. “Science is a valuable tool to help policymakers navigate complex issues.”
“However, when inconvenient facts are disregarded or when dissenting voices are muzzled, a frank discussion becomes impossible,” the lawmakers continued. “The EPA cannot continue to rush ahead with costly regulations without allowing time for a real-world look at the science.”
Republicans previously asked the EPA about how it responded to the scientific reviewers’ concerns, but agency officials distanced themselves from their own advisers, according to the letter. Specifically, lawmakers questioned the agency’s requirement that coal plants must install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology in order to be built. The agency, however, said that their new power plant rule does not need to address such concerns about CCS.
“The claim that the rule doesn’t need to address storage concerns highlights your agency’s continued lack of transparency and consistent attempts to avoid accountability,” the Republicans added.
“The EPA’s proposed power plant regulations will put Americans out of work and will make electricity more expensive and less reliable,” they continued. “It is misleading and dangerous for EPA to quietly dismiss inconvenient facts and ignore the consequences of its costly regulations. Americans deserve honesty.”
The EPA’s proposed power plant emissions limits would essentially require that all new coal-fired power plants be built using CCS technology, which is not a commercially proven technology.
“Carbon capture and sequestration technology can help us reduce carbon pollution and move us toward a cleaner, more stable environment,” said Mathy Stanislaus, EPA’s assistant administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response.
The agency justified imposing CCS requirements on U.S. coal plants based on three government-backed projects, one under construction in Mississippi and two planned in Texas and California. The agency also cited one Canadian government-backed project under construction.
However, the coal industry argues that there are no commercial-scale coal plants using CCS operating in the country. Republicans also argue that the EPA violated the Environmental Policy Act by mandating technology where the only examples of it are government-supported.
“In light of these statutory prohibitions, we request that the EPA’s proposed rule, which has not yet been published in the Federal Register, be withdrawn,” reads a letter to the EPA from Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “This will ensure that the agency does not propose standards beyond its legal authority. This will also ensure that stakeholders and the public will not have to incur additional costs to respond to a proposal that contravenes applicable law.”
Even former Obama administration officials have expressed skepticism about CCS technology’s commercial viability.
“[I]t is disingenuous to state that the technology is ‘ready,’” said Charles McConnell, who was the assistant secretary of energy until January. He now serves as the executive director of the Energy & Environment Initiative at Rice University.
“Studies have verified that implementation of [CSS] technology is necessary to comply with EPA’s proposed [EPA carbon-emissions limits] regulation and meet the [greenhouse gas] targets necessary for limiting CO2 emissions to our atmosphere,” McConnell said in his prepared congressional testimony. “However, commercial [CSS] technology currently is not available to meet EPA’s proposed rule. The cost of current CO2 capture technology is much too high to be commercially viable.”
Critics are slamming Reddit over a single moderator’s decision to ban climate-change skeptics from contributing to its science forum, attacking the move as “political censorship.”
In an op-ed titled “Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers do the same?” Nathan Allen—who himself a Ph.D. chemist for a major chemical company and a moderator on Reddit’s “/r/science” forum—explained his decision to wipe comments from some users he dismissed as “problematic.”
“These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking,” Allen said in his article, which is posted on Grist.org. “They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong.”
Allen went on to attack climate-change skeptics further, saying that evidence to support their position “simply does not exist” and that such people are “enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.”
‘[Climate skeptics are] enamored by the emotionally charged ... arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.’
- Reddit moderator Nathan Allen
Finally, Allen called for other news outlets to follow his example, asking “if a half-dozen volunteers can keep a page with more than 4 million users from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?”
The move has drawn accusations of hypocrisy, as Reddit claims to be a haven for free speech and debate. The site describes itself as a place “friendly to thought, relationships, arguments, and to those that wish to challenge those genres.”
Brendan O’Neill, in a blog post for the UK Daily Telegraph, said Reddit has “ripped its own reputation to shreds,” and described the move as “political censorship, designed to silence the expression of dissent about climate-change alarmism on one of the Internet’s most popular user-generated forums.”
James Delingpole, columnist, climate skeptic and author of “The Little Green Book Of Eco Fascism,” was even louder in his criticism.
“The greenies—and their many useful idiots in the liberal media—are terrified of open debate on climate-change because the real world evidence long ago parted company with their scientifically threadbare theory,” Delingpole told FoxNews.com, arguing that Allen’s tactic is part of a “classic liberal defense mechanism: If the facts don’t support you, then close down the argument.”
Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of communications, told FoxNews.com that while it was Allen’s prerogative to ban climate-change skeptics from “/r/science,” his statements “do not reflect the views of Reddit as a whole, or other science or climate-oriented subreddits.”
“Each subreddit community is entitled to its own views, and anyone who wants to start their own subreddit is welcome to do so devoted to their views, opinions or interests,” Taylor said.
While there is a subreddit dedicated to climate skeptics, it has far less research than the larger science board.
The move follows an October decision by Paul Thornton—the letters section editor for the Los Angeles Times—who said he wouldn’t publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in the planet’s warming climate, saying that denying climate-change “is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.’
Kelly McBride, who studies media ethics and is a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, defended the LA Times decision, telling FoxNews.com in November she was “all in favor” of Thornton refusing skeptics.
“One of our ethical imperatives as journalists is to speak the truth,” McBride said. “And when we constantly allow people to say things that are known falsehoods, we undermine the public perception and the facts of an issue.”
“It’s not like we in society want these voices to go away,” she said. “We just want them in proper tone and context.”
Allen’s climate-change comments are not the first time that Reddit’s moderation has been the subject of controversy. Earlier this year Reddit’s /r/politics” forum banned a variety of sites, including Fox Nation, Huffington Post and National Review, in what it claimed was a move to avoid sensationalized headlines and “bad journalism.”
Update:
Even more serious questions concern Beale’s policy work in the Office of Air and Radiation. Beale was one of the top career employees working on the Clean Air Act and on climate policies for a long time. He played a key role in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and in the implementation of that act. He also headed the EPA delegation to UN climate talks for several years. As the Wall Street Journal put it in an excellent editorial:
“Are we now supposed to believe that in contrast to his other lies, the work Beale chose to perform at EPA is the product of careful and honest analysis? What Congress needs to examine is whether the policies that the head of EPA says were shaped to a large degree by Beale were also based on fraud. Oh, and what Gina McCarthy knew or suspected, and why she so admired a fraudster.”
Gina McCarthy, who was confirmed as administrator of the EPA this summer, was for four years assistant administrator for air and radiation and thus Beale’s boss. She was first warned about Beale in 2010, but did not act until 2013.
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By Michael Isikoff, NBC News National Investigative Correspondent
The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.
John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his “historic” lies are “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA. Beale’s lawyer, while acknowledging his guilt, has asked for leniency and offered a psychological explanation for the climate expert’s bizarre tales.
“With the help of his therapist,” wrote attorney John Kern, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Kern also said Beale was driven “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives...that are fueled by his insecurities.”
The two sentencing memos, along with documents obtained by NBC News, offer new details about what some officials describe as one of the most audacious, and creative, federal frauds they have ever encountered.
When he first began looking into Beale’s deceptions last February, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, How could this possibly have happened in this agency?” said EPA Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan, who spearheaded the Beale probe, in an interview with NBC News. “I’ve worked for the government for 35 years. I’ve never seen a situation like this.”
Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.
Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.
In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.
To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials, including McCarthy, that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
:Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010 email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas....Ho, ho, ho.”
In fact, Beale had no relationship with the CIA at all. Sullivan, the EPA investigator, said he confirmed Beale didn’t even have a security clearance. He spent much of the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod.
“He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”
Nor was that Beale’s only deception, according to court documents. In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.
When first questioned by EPA officials early this year about his alleged CIA undercover work, Beale brushed them aside by saying he couldn’t discuss it, according to Sullivan. Weeks later, after being confronted again by investigators, Beale acknowledging the truth but “didn’t show much remorse,” Sullivan said. The explanation he offered for his false CIA story? “He wanted to puff up his own image,” said Sullivan.
Even at that point, prosecutors say, Beale sought to “cover his tracks.” He told a few close colleagues at EPA that he would plead guilty “to take one for the team,” suggesting that he was willing to go to jail to protect people at the CIA. This has led some EPA officials to continue to believe that Beale actually does have a connection to the CIA, Sullivan said.
Kern, Beale’s lawyer, declined to comment to NBC News. But in his court filing, he asks Judge Ellen Huvelle, who is due to sentence Beale Wednesday, to balance Beale’s misdeeds against years of admirable work for the government. These include helping to rewrite the Clean Air Act in 1990, heading up EPA delegations to United Nations conferences on climate change in 2000 and 2001, and helping to negotiate agreements to reduce carbon emissions with China, India and other nations.
Two congressional committees are now pressing the EPA, including administrator McCarthy, for answers on the handling of Beale’s case. The new inspector general’s reports fault the agency for a lack of internal controls and policies that allegedly facilitated Beale’s deceptions.
For example, one of the reports states, Beale took 33 airplane trips between 2003 and 2011, costing the government $266,190. On 70 percent of those, he travelled first class and stayed at high end hotels, charging more than twice the government’s allowed per diem limit. But his expense vouchers were routinely approved by another EPA official, a colleague of Beale’s, whose conduct is now being reviewed by the inspector general, according to congressional investigators briefed on the report.
Beale was caught when he “retired” very publicly but kept drawing his large salary for another year and a half. Top EPA officials, including McCarthy, attended a September 2011 retirement party for Beale and two colleagues aboard a Potomac yacht. Six months later, McCarthy learned he was still on the payroll.
In a March 29, 2012 email, she wrote, “I thought he had already retired. She then initiated a review that was forwarded to the EPA general counsel’s office . But the inspector general’s office was not alerted until February 2013 and he didn’t actually retire until April.
Sullivan said he doubted Beale’s fraud could occur at any federal agency other than the EPA. “There’s a certain culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing,” he said. “They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very trusting and accepting.”
In a statement to NBC News, Alisha Johnson, McCarthy’s press secretary, said that Beale’s fraud was “uncovered” by McCarthy while she was head of the Office of Air and Radiation. “[Beale] is a convicted felon who went to great lengths to deceive and defraud the U.S. government over the span of more than a decade,” said Johnson. “EPA has worked in coordination with its inspector general and the U.S. Attorney’s office. The Agency has [put] in place additional safeguards to help protect against fraud and abuse related to employee time and attendance, including strengthening supervisory controls of time and attendance, improved review of employee travel and a tightened retention incentive processes.”